concrete against communities Peabody Terrace and the mixed legacy of Modernist urban planning

garrett dash nelson

17 April 2007

Harvard College Literature & Arts B-20 Professor Alex Krieger Nelson 1

Architect and critic Robert Campbell was at a party in the Riverside neighborhood when a friend of his remarked: “Oh, Riverside is such a pleasant little neighborhood—tree- shaded streets, and small , and all that—except for those three ugly concrete towers that

Harvard has just built.”1 Not long after, in the definitive annal of Harvard’s architectural legacy, Bainbridge Bunting and Margaret Henderson Floyd praised “one of the most suc- cessful contemporary at Harvard and perhaps the best thing the Sert office has done.”2 Both Campbell’s friend and Bunting and Floyd were referring to the same :

Peabody Terrace, Harvard’s 1963 paean to Modernist optimism and a building complex whose admiration by designers is matched only by its detestation by its neighbors. Perhaps no better example exists of “a building beloved by architects and disliked by almost everyone else.”3

The design of Peabody Terrace represents to many academics an exemplar of brilliant city planning on a micro-scale. In its tiny parcel of land, it masterfully incorporates and ap- propriates the lessons of the century of design and planning that preceded its construction.

Its form, layout, and were specifically oriented with the considerations of its surrounding community in mind, and it was built with a high-minded academic confidence in planning’s ability to incorporate social design into a harmonious built environment. Its principal designer, Josep Lluís Sert, the former dean of the Graduate School of Design and the founder of its urban design program, is widely regarded amongst planners and architects as a scion of the enlightened design strategies that grew out of the postwar celebration of better cities through better theories. “Cities,” he argued, “are the cradle’s of man’s progress

1 Campbell, Robert, “Why Don’t the Rest of Us Like the Buildings the Architects Like?”, Bulletin of the Ameri- can Academy of Arts and Sciences (Summer 2004): 22.

2 Bunting, Bainbridge and Margaret Henderson Floyd, Harvard: An Architectural History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1985), 267.

3 Campbell, 22. Nelson 2 and have fostered knowledge in every form.”4 Peabody Terrace rises from an intellectual manifest intimately intertwined with the hopeful faith in good design that impelled Jeffer- son’s gridded rationalism, Olmsted’s interleaved parks, and Burnham’s grand concourses. It is, in many ways, the built evidence of the high-water mark of urban optimism at Harvard— risk-taking, assertive, and fringed with a bit of hubris. In its concrete fenestrations, louvered , and porous axes, the heady posturing of urban design takes concrete form.

And yet to almost all those who are unfamiliar with the lusty academic arguments be- hind city planning—those for whom communities are simply lived in, rather than thought about—Peabody Terrace is reviled and lamented, assailed as ugly and inhumane. It has been accused of being “monstrous,” “cold,” “uninviting,” “overwhelming,” and “hostile,” and some unflatteringly draw out a comparison to “Soviet housing.”5 Its presence still embitters

Riverside residents against Harvard even forty years after its construction.6 How, then, to reconcile this dramatic disjoint between the clergy and the laypeople of urban planning?

How can it be that those who the planned environment of Peabody Terrace come to such different conclusions as those who inhabit it? And how could the undeniably well- intentioned, well-informed, and well-executed plan of Peabody Terrace have turned out to miss its objectives by so much?

The addition of new married-student housing to the southeastern corner of Harvard’s campus came at the center of President Nathan Marsh Pusey’s ambitious Program for Har- vard College, an enormous capital investment program from 1958 to 1971 that signaled not only the expanded needs of the university, but “the changed condition of Harvard.”7 Pe-

4 Quoted in Torres, Andrew Michael, From Avant-Garde to : José Luis Sert, Urban Design, and (Cambridge: Harvard University Department of the History of Science, 2002), 54.

5 Gewertz, Ken, “Making Harvard Modern,” The Harvard University Gazette (9 October 2003), http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2003/10.09/09-sert.html.

6 Hurley, Mary, “Down by Riverside, a Feud Runs Through It,” (2 February 2003): 10.

7 Bunting, 230. Nelson 3 abody Terrace was envisioned as a community for Harvard’s growing married graduate stu- dent population and a counterpart to the “Harvard style” of river housing that dominated the Charles riverfront. It would retain the features for which Harvard housing complexes were famous but update their execution for the modern period, by “defining the quadrangles following the traditional pattern and providing vertical accents that in some ways recall the old towers.”8

But the project could neither feasibly nor desirably copy-and-paste the existing Har- vard housing stock. Peabody Terrace was constructed five years earlier than its present-day neighbor, Mather , and so it represented a slender finger of protrusion of Harvard’s campus from , the university’s southeastern border at the time. This exten- sion of Harvard land intruded into a neighborhood far different in character from what

Harvard needed in its new housing complex. Riverside was (and remains today) a commu- nity of small multi-family and single-family houses, few more than three stories, mostly dat- ing from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and built largely in a picturesque

Victorian style. Most importantly—as evidenced in the neighborhood’s very name—the community was crucially linked to the Charles River and Memorial Drive, the central rec- reational and aesthetic destination for the residents of the neighborhood. Gridded, tree- lined streets—the stuff of Campbell’s friend’s wistfulness and the much-desired archetype of the American community then and today—made up the bulk of Riverside’s urban layout.

Separated from the bustle of both Harvard and Central Squares, outside the margin of the university, and made up of a lower-middle-class but very community-oriented demographic,

Riverside residents enjoyed their neighborhood as it was: perhaps somewhat run-down, but human-scaled and traditional.

Into this neighborhood Harvard hoped to inject a housing complex whose economy dictated high density and whose stature demanded ambitious modern design. The university

8 Josep Lluis Sert: His Work and Ways (Tokyo: Process Architecture, 1982), 96. Nelson 4 simply could not build at the existing scale of the neighborhood, as it had hundreds of new students in urgent need of housing, and to place them all in low-slung Victorian-Colonial bungalows would have meant buying up much of the city of Cambridge. All of Harvard’s housing had, until this point, been exclusively concerned with the needs of Harvard stu- dents. The new building would retain some of this selfishness; Harvard intended the project an extension of its campus and “the architects considered it essential to consolidate the site by eliminating all vehicular through-traffic” through the closure of Sterling and Banks

Streets.9 Meanwhile, however, Harvard’s new role as intruder into neighborhoods that had previously been insulated from institutional growth meant that the university now reluc- tantly had to consider community concerns it had previously been able to ignore. Progressive

Architecture summarized the design challenge as follows:

On the one hand, the architects were asked to tie the project into the comparatively low scale

of the neighborhood, but at the same time to supply the much higher density required by the

university; to open the new spaces to the neighborhoods, while still shielding the views from

the often dilapidated environment; to open a sequence of spaces and pedestrian walks to river-

front recreation areas not only for the tenants but but also for the townspeople, but to effect

this without encroaching on the privacy of those living in the apartments; and finally, to place

the high-rise units so as not to ‘obscure the sky’, while still establishing their spatial relation-

ship to each other.10

Sert hoped that the dilemma could be solved by the application of the new principles of ‘urban design’, a term that he “more or less coined,” and a discipline with which he was intimately familiar.11 The design of the new complex, Sert believed, should begin with the neighborhood and grow from there. Its architecture should not consider only the land

9 “Harvard’s New Married-Student Housing,” Progressive Architecture (December 1964), 130.

10 Ibid., 132.

11 Campbell, Robert. “Harvard Exhibitions Showcase Sert as the Soul of Collaboration,” The Boston Globe (12 October 2003): N2. Nelson 5 within its own parcel, but reference the neighborhood around it. Incorporating one of the first social studies of urban life, Sert observed how the residents of Riv- erside interacted with the Charles River and the area where Peabody Terrace would be sited, considering pedestrian patterns, perceptions of height and space, and nodes of congregation. Site plan showing in red the deliberate pedestrian routes Out of this academic ferment came a design planned from the community to the river. painted in the broad strokes of the academic ambitions of urban design. Instead of walling off the river behind gated of brick in the fash- ion of and , Peabody Terrace would remain ‘porous’ to the surrounding community. Its courtyards and balconies would be designed specifically to wel- come in those in the neighborhoods and to encourage intermingling between the students and the residents. “Again it was very important to consider the environment and ties [...] with the city of Cambridge,” commented Sert on the design of the complex. “We could not establish a massive barrier between the neighborhoods behind the site and the riverfront, as many of the older houses had done.”12 City planning has always been an design form deeply rooted in the political and social needs of the community, treading the line between civics and art. Envisioning Harvard’s link to the Riverside community, Sert was no different: “He was very much a spirited citizen, not a closeted academic [...] He took his responsibilities as a citizen very seriously.”13 In designing Peabody Terrace, he preoccupied himself with its interrelationships and its socially fertile forces, forming, in his words, “a context, or a set of contexts, within which meaningful social action can be both generated and interpreted.”14

12 Ibid.

13 Mary Daniels, quoted in Gewertz.

14 Rovira, Josep M. (ed.), Sert, 1928–1979: Half a Century of Architecture (Barcelona: Fundació Joan Miró, 2005), 289. Nelson 6

And, in fact, the final design for the site does a commendable

job of delicately situating a heavy-density institutional complex in

amongst a medium-density residential neighborhood. It was cele-

brated by Sert’s contemporaries as a masterwork, confirming him as

one of the leading designers of his time and earning him the prestig-

ious Parker Medal from the Boston Society of Architects in 1966. By

converting Sterling Street to an open pedestrian way, Sert was able to

add a rational spinal focus to the design which“continues past the end The complex is situated around the pedestrian-oriented Sterling Street, of the to open unexpectedly into the main central square—a and its varying elevations and orienta- tions create a ‘porous’ structure to the 15 neighborhood behind it. brick-paved plaza ringed on all sides by public facilities.” This orien- tation was deliberately chosen to let Riverside residents pass through

the new Harvard intrusion to get to the Charles, thus minimizing the impact of the new

construction on the neighborhood. Progressive Architecture compared Peabody Terrace fa-

vorably against the unsympathetic design of contemporary projects:

Contrary to today’s often introverted residential planning, the existing neighborhood is in this

instance allowed to penetrate into the new complex; the brick-paved walkway to the river is

intended for the students and their families as well as local residents. Further, it is hoped that

the central brick-paved square, with its public meeting , its drugstore and outdoor ter-

race, its dry cleaner and laundry, and nurseries will attract both town and gown to make it a

lively and animated community center.16

The design of the complex, too, is testament to a theoretical architecture which aims

more at social harmony and expression of a fair and equitable community rather than mere

aesthetic expression. Here, too, the intellectual arguments behind the design are compelling

to the trained architect: the masses of the buildings are designed to coalesce up from the

scale of the neighborhood, gradually growing pyramidally until reaching the slender pro-

15 “Harvard’s New Married-Student Housing,” 130.

16 Ibid., 132. Nelson 7 portions of the towers. The periphery of the site is designed to engage the scale and style of the surrounding community, gradually The combination of low-rises and high-rises “are molded and shaped to form a sequence of engaging spaces.”17 Sensitive of the accusations of sterility leveled against the undifferentiated concrete slabs of modern architecture, Sert worked in “visual exits that invite exploration, and variations in the heigh of structures sur- rounding the spaces [to] keep these courtyards from being static or monotonous.”18 Though trained by and imbued in the iconic ideals of the Modern movement, Peabody

Terrace in some ways preëmpts the critics of the Modernists, for it “visually, perceptually, and phenomenologically” reacts to Sert’s worry that “rationalist urbanism was creating large-scale architectural and urban environment that were deadening in their visual redundancy.”19

Peabody Terrace is an individualized architectural program, as well. The design employs an ingenious skip-stop system of that let residents off at windowed corridors with leading up to rooms that spread the length of the tower. Its variegated system of apartments and suites stems from a humanistic belief

“that families vary greatly, that their needs differ, and that the maximum choice of interior space, of amounts of light, of indoor versus outdoor space must be The alternating skip-stop create a variety of spaces and avoid the dark, windowless corridors of other provided.”20 The interiors are beautiful, simple spaces, apartment complexes. open to the air and all furnished with balconies, which Sert designed to double as fire es-

17 Bunting, 267.

18 Ibid., 269.

19 Rovira, 284.

20 “Harvard’s New Married-Student Housing,” 128. Nelson 8 capes so they could not be cut from the budget. All in all, it represents a “model of design efficiency, economy, and attention to scale.”21 To architects everywhere, Peabody Terrace represents something to admire if not to outright strive for, an encapsulation of the kind of

“artful urbanism [that] would establish satisfactory proportional relationships between buildings and open spaces.”22

But architects do not make up the entire world. And for most others, fawning over

Peabody Terrace would seem a strange sentiment indeed. Where architects celebrate fa-

çades that are “visually energetic in ways that few high-rise buildings can match,”23 neigh- bors see “crates, , and so much cement. And then more cement.”24 Most Harvard undergraduates are only dimly aware of the presence of three ‘ugly’ towers beyond Mather

House. Some passers-by mistake it for subsidized housing. And despite Sert’s genuine intel- lectual commitment to making the complex work dynamically with the surrounding com- munity, Peabody Terrace has been at “the heart of the very tenuous, and sometimes antago- nist” relationship between Harvard and its Riverside neighbors.25

Is it then still fair to preserve Sert’s reputation as an “architect du peuple, not an archi- tect du roi [...] informed by an honesty, an openness, a caring, and a core philosophy of design”?26 Or should he be more harshly judged based on accusations of optimistic naïveté that produced an “unwelcome, unattractive, and uncomfortable intrusion of the University into a quiet residential neighborhood”?27 Perhaps architects must face up to the fact that

21 Cott, Lee, “Why Architects Love Peabody Terrace,” ArchitectureBoston (Vol. 6, No. 4, July/August 2003): 23.

22 Rovira, 290.

23 Cott, 25.

24 McManus, Otile, “Why the Public (Still) Hates Peabody Terrace,” ArchitectureBoston (Vol. 6, No. 4, July/ August 2003): 26.

25 Ibid., 26.

26 Kay, Jane Holtz, “Josep Lluis Sert,” The Christian Science Monitor (8 April 1983): 17.

27 Torres, 61. Nelson 9 what happens inside the academy simply has no meaning to the majority of people for which architecture is made. The porous axes, the massing of forms, the variegated façade—all these items in an academic sense are unlikely to attract the attention of a Riverside resident who sees only the unfriendly exterior of gray slabs. There is no getting around the fact that modern architecture simply sits badly in many Americans’ views. The history of the Ameri- can city is rife with master plans that ignite the pulses of designers but alienate resi- dents—witness Boston City , the Pan Am Building in New York City, or the Hirshorn

Museum in Washington, D.C. Peabody Terrace references many of the themes that Ameri- cans find distasteful about international modernism: “ruthless continuation and repetition of the unit typology [...] standardized to the point of being prototypical.”28 Sert was a foreigner steeped in the vanguard of European modernism, and perhaps he simply underestimated the architectural conservatism of Cambridge’s lower-middle class.

But the stark divide between architects’ opinions on Peabody Terrace and everyone else’s suggests a more systematic problem for the élites of architectural taste. Discussing the project, Terry Rankine suggests that architects “build for each other to a far greater extent than [they] build for the people who are going to occupy their buildings.”29 Perhaps the his- tory of Peabody Terrace must simply reckon with the fact that architects and laypeople have radically different aesthetic sensibilities. Perhaps mixed in with Sert’s hopeful optimism is a bit of arrogance, a bit of out-of-touch misunderstanding about what Riverside would accept.

However, it is unfair to lay all the blame for Peabody Terrace’s shortcomings on Sert.

Certainly his intellectual arguments for the project turned out to be somewhat askew from what the practical dictates of the project would involved. But there is no reason to indicate he acted maliciously, and there is no reason to doubt his genuinity in hoping to address the

28 Aufiero, Tod A., Housing for an Urban Institution; the Re-Designing of Peabody Terrace as a Critical Analysis (Cambridge: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 1985).

29 Padjen, Elizabeth et al., “Talking About a Revolution: Cambridge in the ’60s,” ArchitectureBoston (Vol. 6, No. 4, July/August 2003): 12. Nelson 10 social needs of the entire community. Sert—along with many other member of his genera- tion and city designers of all eras—truly did believe that the salve of urban planning could create better modern communities. And he was a step ahead of many of his contemporaries, asserting both that both that modern design must “embrace the realities of contemporary life and serve as agents of social change” but, at the same time, that “the modern movement was committing missteps—similar in effect if not in intent—to those of private developers.”30 He hoped to counter these mistakes, to form a holistic sense of urban design that would incorporate not mere architectural manifesto but community enhancement, so- cial planning, and individual artistic expression.

That these things did not play out is more the fault of the era than it is of Sert him- self. The icons of Modern style simply fell out of favor in the decades after the construction of Peabody Terrace. The hopes for a society that would coalesce around new designs and spatial organizations collapsed in the early 1970s; “Sert’s many attempts to integrate the complex into the surrounding neighborhood failed not because of poor design strategies but, in the city of Cambridge, because the social revolution of the Great Society, whereby

America’s underclasses would be assimilated into the social mainstream, never came to pass.”31 And Peabody Terrace could not escape its iconic status as Harvard’s commanding fist of arrogance into the community. Years of neglect by the university have left many

Cambridge residents embittered against an institution that “tells you what they plan to do, and then they tell you again and again, with no for discussion or negotiation.”32 Per- haps anything Harvard thrust into the Riverside community would have met with objec- tions.

30 Rovira, 283.

31 Rovira, 294.

32 McManus, 27. Nelson 11

In the end, the lesson that seems to be drawn from the experience of Peabody Ter- race is one of progress’s eternal self-conflict and perpetual need for renewal. Though the form of Peabody Terrace may not have worked in alignment with Sert’s manifesto, that does not render the manifesto any less potent. Architects are indeed correct in applauding the place as “a framework for the happenstance exigencies of modern life that creates the sense of locality that [Sert] identified as the essential missing feature of the modern city.”33 But they must simultaneously never forget the indictment of heady theorizing inherent in popu- lar opinion over Peabody Terrace. The history of design is replete with these stories: Jeffer- son’s gridded cities in time became monotonous; Olmsted’s parks suggested the specter of suburbanization; Burnham’s grand boulevards became icons of patronization. Peabody Ter- race, the embodiment of postwar optimism about the power of design to recreate the

American city, did not yield what its theorists hoped. But it still stands as a guidepost on the ever-moving traverse of urban design, and it is among the most striking occurrences of bril- liant theory and failed pragmatics to coexist in a single design.

A view from the Charles River with Peabody Terrace at left.

33 Rovira, 293. Nelson 12 image credits

Sert, Jackson, and Gourley. Peabody Terrace, Site plan showing pedestrian traffic flow. Loeb Li-

brary.

Sert, Jackson, and Gourley. Peabody Terrace, Site plan. Loeb Library.

Sert, Jackson, and Gourley. Peabody Terrace, Plan of corridor and non-corridor floor. Loeb

Library.

Hunsberger, David H. Views of the Charles River. Radcliffe Archives.